NOTES
(1)It follows a definition taken from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia): "Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia wiki service.. ..Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an Internet connection. The project began on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has more than 3,380,000 articles, including more than 997,000 in the English-language version..".
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons: "The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share. The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web..."
(3)Some excerpts relevant for the purpose of this document follow.
"... Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms...
The freedom to use a program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job...
However, certain kinds of rules about the manner of distributing free software are acceptable, when they don't conflict with the central freedoms. For example, copyleft (very simply stated) is the rule that when redistributing the program, you cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central freedoms. This rule does not conflict with the central freedoms; rather it protects them...
``Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important...
In the GNU project, we use ''copyleft'' to protect these freedoms legally for everyone. But non-copylefted free software also exists. We believe there are important reasons why it is better to use copyleft, but if your program is non-copylefted free software, we can still use it..."
(4)Freedom 2 and freedom 3 have a rational in the developer's goal of "helping the others".
(5)"He is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation. An acclaimed programmer, his major accomplishments include Emacs (and the later GNU Emacs), the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.." (from Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallman).
(6)https://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/pragmatic.html.
(7)A list of free software licenses is available at https://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list.html.
(8)This ethical perspective is shared by an increasing number of people around the world (number that grows side by side with the spreading of the possibilities of the digital technologies and computer networks).
Even though, it is worth pointing out that many people disagree with this idea and give weight to the traditional economic justification for copyright: temporary monopoly granted by copyright benefits everybody because it fosters creativity and innovation.
(9)For example, the copyleft clause has a positive effect fostering people to release free software and, at the same time, it limits only freedom of the users to redistribute the software under a proprietary license, which reduces the benefit of the software for most individuals.
(10)Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, R.M. Stallman, Gnu Press, 2002, chapter 19 p. 141:
"We need to look at different kinds of works, and I'd like to propose a way of doing this.
The first class of works is that of functional works - that is, works whose use is to get a job done.
This includes recipes, computer programs, manuals and textbooks, and reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias. For all these functional works, I believe that the issues are basically the same as they are for software and the same conclusions apply. People should have the freedom even to publish a modified version because it's very useful to modify functional works. People's needs are not all the same. If I wrote this work to do the job I think needs doing, your idea of a job you want to do may be somewhat different. So you want to modify this work to do what's good for you. At this point, there may be other people who have similar needs to yours, and your modified version might be good for them. Everybody who cooks knows this and has known this for hundreds of years. It's normal to make copies of recipes and hand them out to other people, and it's also normal to change a recipe. If you change the recipe and cook it for your friends and they like eating it, they might ask you, 'Could I have the recipe?' Then maybe you'll write down your version and give them copies. That is exactly the same thing that we much later started doing in the free-software community.
So that's one class of works.
The second class of works is works whose purpose is to say what certain people think. Talking about those people is their purpose. This includes, for instance, memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of goods for sale. The whole point of these works is that they tell you what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes. To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these works is not a socially useful activity. So verbatim copying is the only thing that people really need to be allowed to.
The next question is: Should people have the right to do commercial verbatim copying? Or is noncommercial enough? You see, these are two different activities we can distinguish, so that we can consider the questions separately - the right to do noncommercial verbatim copying and the right to do commercial verbatim copying. Well, it might be a good compromise policy to have copyright cover commercial verbatim copying but allow everyone the right to do noncommercial verbatim copying. This way, the copyright on the commercial verbatim copying, as well as on all modified versions - only the author could approve a modified version - would still provide the same revenue stream that it provides now to fund the writing of these works, to whatever extent it does.
By allowing the noncommercial verbatim copying, it means the copyright no longer has to intrude into everybody's home. It becomes an industrial regulation again, easy to enforce and painless, no longer requiring draconian punishment and informers for the sake of its enforcement. So we get most of the benefit, and avoid most of the horror, of the current system.
The third category of works is aesthetic or entertaining works, where the most important thing is just the sensation of looking at the work. Now for these works, the issue of modification is a very difficult one because on the one hand, there is the idea that these works reflect the vision of an artist and to change them is to mess up that vision. On the other hand, you have the fact that there is the folk process, where a sequence of people modifying a work can sometimes produce a result that is extremely rich. Even when you have artists producing the works, borrowing from previous works is often very useful. Some of Shakespeare's plays used a story that was taken from some other play. If today's copyright laws had been in effect back then, those plays would have been illegal. It's a hard question what we should do about publishing modified versions of an aesthetic or an artistic work, and we might have to look for further subdivisions of the category in order to solve this problem. For example, maybe computer game scenarios should be treated one way; maybe everybody should be free to publish modified versions of them. But perhaps a novel should be treated differently; perhaps for that, commercial publication should require an arrangement with the original author.
Now if commercial publication of these aesthetic works is covered by copyright, that will give most of the revenues stream that exists today to support the authors and musicians, to the limited extent that the present system supports them, because [the present system] does a very bad job. So that might be a reasonable compromise, just as in the case of the works which represent certain people..."
(11)http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
(12)It is worth to notice that these are completely different questions from that of identifying the "most effective license" fostering altruistic individual choices to release free works. The GNU GPL has proved to be the most effective license for fostering further free software development; the GNU FDL helped fostering a free encyclopedia. Until now copylefted licenses demonstrated to be effective in allowing altruistic behavior to flourish, as long as functional works (like software and encyclopedias) are concerned. Time will demonstrate which licenses will be the most effective in other domains.
(13)LESSIG L., Free Culture, The Penguin Press, New York, 2004, p. XV.
(14)See note 10.
(15)Assuming, like it seems also reasonable, that Stallman expresses a position shared by people from the free software movement.
(16)A, A-SA, A-ND, A-NC, A-NC-SA, A-NC-ND are the 6 possible licenses that are formed by the combination of the following 4 characteristics: 'A' means Attribution and since version 2 of the CCPL it is present in all licenses; 'NC' means Noncommercial; 'ND' means no derivative works; 'SA' means share alike (it is the copyleft characteristic of the Creative Commons licenses). ND and SA are incompatible.
(17)A-ND, A-NC, A-NC-SA and A-NC-ND are acceptable for works that express what people think and some kind of aesthetic and entertaining works.
(18)The Developing Nations License (http://creativecommons.org/license/devnations) allows a wide range of royalty-free uses of the work in developing nations only, not in the developed world.
(19)http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling/1.0/
(20)Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of one of the following licenses:
1) Gnu Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. The text of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
2) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The text of the license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/.